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What is Accelerated Mobile Page?

Google has been pushing an new concept called Accelerated Mobile Pages, in short AMP. This post explains what AMP is and aims to do, who should implement and why, how to get your WordPress site ready for AMP.

What is Accelerated Mobile Page?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project logo the Accelerated Mobile Pages project aims to make pages load instantly on mobile. The web is slow for lots and lots of people, in fact, the majority of the people using the internet do so over a mobile phone, often with a 2G or sometimes 3G connection. To make pages load instantly, AMP restricts what you can do in HTML Pages. The fancy design is stripped out in favor of speed. AMP is very much a function over form project.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is a very accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile web pages. The open-source initiative is designed to enable publishers to easily improve speed (and consequently, the user experience) for their mobile readership without sacrificing any ad revenue that they may rely upon.

Although experienced developers can often achieve similar results through intensive performance optimizations, publishers often neglect this due to resource constraints, AMP allows these optimizations to be easily achieved without altering the primary mobile web experience.

There’s also the added benefit of its future usage by Google and other prominent web technology companies, who are encouraging its use by integrating it heavily into their respective platforms.

Accelerated Mobile pages look like a much stripped down version of normal web pages but do contain all the important content. Not all ads will work on Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), not all analytics will work with Accelerated Mobile Pages. All the “fluff” of your pages is stripped in Accelerated Mobile Pages, including the read more links you might have built into your theme etc.

I have a personal opinion about Accelerated Mobile Pages which is not very flattering, which I have written about here. Regardless of my opinion, though with Google pushing it this hard, news sites and blogs basically have no choice but to implement it. Google is giving prime real estate to Accelerated Mobile Pages in mobile search results, and if you do not have AMP on your site, you are not getting any of that traffic.

So, while I’m reluctant, I’m also telling you: if you run a news site or a blog, you need to make sure your site supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s as simple as that.

Which plugin(s) to use?

How Does AMP Work?

AMP HTML: A subset of HTML, this markup language has some custom tags and properties and many restrictions. But if you are familier with regular HTML, you should not have difficulty adaption existing pages to AMP HTML. For more details on how it differs from basic HTML, check out AMP Project’s list of required markup that your AMP HTML page “must” have.

AMP JS: A Javascript framework for mobile pages. For the most part, it manages resource handling and asynchronous loading. It should be noted that third-party JavaScript is not permitted with AMP.

AMP CDN: A optional Content Delivery Network, it will take your AMP-enabled pages, cache theme and automatically make some preformance optmizations.